George Martin - Suicide Kings

As if reading Wally’s mind, Ana asked, “Do you still keep in touch with DB?”

“Sure do.” They’d gone to war together, Wally and the rock star. Twice. They’d been through a lot.

He looked around the room. Except for Ana, none of the people he knew best were around. In addition to Kate and DB, Wally missed Michelle, who was still down in New Orleans and apparently not doing too good. King Cobalt, his first friend from American Hero, had died in Egypt. So had Simoon, who had been pretty nice to Wally.

Except that she wasn’t entirely dead, not all the time, anyway. Bugsy and Simoon were going out, which Wally couldn’t begin to understand. All he knew was that Bugsy spent most of his time these days with Cameo, who had joined the Committee last year in New Orleans, before she lost her old-time hat. They were having their own Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was a time to be with family. But what family? More and more, his visits home to Minnesota made him feel lonely and isolated. He thought he’d found a family, of sorts, with the Committee. And that had even been true for a short time. But he didn’t feel at home with the Committee any longer. And so Wally had tried to help other families, on his own, but now even that seemed to be going away.

A little cheer went up throughout the room when a stream of servers emerged from the kitchen. They brought out turkey, chicken, goose, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, three kinds of gravy, cranberries, corn bread, spinach salad, fruit salad, and pumpkin, pecan, apple, and cherry pie. They even brought out a turducken. Wally wouldn’t have known what that was if he hadn’t heard Holy Roller and Toad Man discussing it once, back before the big preacher had left the Committee to return to his church in Mississippi. Wally missed him.

He couldn’t imagine anybody eating so much food. And that made him think of Lucien, his little pen pal. A single table here probably held more food than his entire family saw in a month.

“You’re looking glum,” said Ana.

“Just missing folks, I guess.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Like, see, I got these pen pals. It happened because I saw a commercial late at night during a Frankie Yankovic marathon. You know, for one of those setups where you send in a few dollars to help out a kid somewhere?”

Ana smiled. She took a drumstick from the platter at the center of the table. “That’s great, Rusty.”

“Well, I got a few of them. But this one kid, his name’s Lucien, and me and he got to be pretty good friends, writing letters back and forth. But his last letter said-”

Babel started tapping her wineglass with a butter knife. It chimed through the dining room.

Lohengrin stood. He waited for a hush to fall over the room before speaking. The kitchen clamor ebbed and flowed as servers passed through double doors to the dining room.

“ Ja, ja. Welcome. My friends, we are the United Nations Committee for Extraordinary Interventions.” Polite applause. “Today we gather to celebrate our achievements and be thankful for the opportunities we’ve been given. And the world has much to be thankful for since our inception, no?” His laughter actually sounded like ho-ho-ho. Like Santa Claus, if Santa wore magical armor. Before meeting Lohengrin, Wally had never known anybody who laughed like that for real.

If Lucien and his family had much to be thankful for, it had nothing to do with the Committee. In fact, it seemed to be the only thing Rusty had done in the past couple of years that actually improved somebody’s life. But it didn’t even begin to make up for what he and DB had done in Iraq.

The German ace droned on and on, peppering his remarks with references to “my predecessor,” as though there had been some kind of special ceremony to transfer the reins of power when he took over the Committee. Everybody knew that John Fortune had bowed out quietly but quickly after becoming a nat for the second time. Rumor had it he was traveling the world, though to what end, nobody could say.

But thinking about John Fortune and his travels gave Wally an idea.

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

The mood was ugly in Jackson Square. The triple spires of St. Louis Cathedral glistened in their spotlights; nearby, Andrew Jackson waved his hat atop his rearing horse. That was normal enough, but as Jerusha approached, she realized that the crowd ahead of her was… wrong. The stench of death hung around them, and their faces were stiff and unresponsive.

Zombies.

There were at least a couple dozen, more than she’d seen Hoodoo Mama raise up for a long time. At least with Thanksgiving the usual crowds in Jackson Square were sparse, though there were still enough onlookers watching from a wary distance to make Jerusha nervous.

Joey and Juliet were standing at the makeshift wooden “shrine” that enclosed Bubbles, its planks adorned with ribbons and handwritten testimonials. The thick pipes of Michelle’s feeding tubes stabbed into the white cloth that covered her body, which had sunk so deeply into the soft ground that pumps had to remove the water that would otherwise have flooded the depression. Jerusha could hear Joey shouting into the night. “Fuck them. Goddamn leeches. They stole her fucking money. Now they want to kill her, too? Well, fuck that.”

Ink was standing next to Joey, an arm around her, her voice so quiet that Jerusha couldn’t hear it. Whatever she was saying, Joey didn’t like it. Her zombies muttered and groaned. “I ain’t gonna let that that cocksucker of a father and her cunt mother screw Michelle again. I ain’t.” Her lips were pressed into a tight line. A hardness came over her thin face. She ran a hand through the tangled shock of brown hair, ruffling the bright red streak. “I’ll fucking rip them both into a hundred fucking pieces. I swear.”

“Ink, Joey,” Jerusha said loudly, skirting the edge of the zombie crowd. “Listen, you can’t…”

She stopped at the sound of sirens, cutting through the low whine of the pumps driving Michelle’s feeding tubes. Along Decatur Street, a small motorcade pulled into the square, pulling up on the far side of Bubbles’s shrine, near a large grey electrical box. Jerusha plunged a hand into the open zipper of the pouch at her waist, fingering the seeds inside.

NOLA SWAT police officers piled out of the first three black vans, their faces masked by riot helmets, armed with what looked to be shotguns. Ira and Sharon LaFleur emerged from a limousine, accompanied by another phalanx of policemen.

Jerusha had always pictured them as villains, monsters who would steal money from their child. She’d expected their sins to be written on their faces, but they weren’t. Ira was balding and overweight, looking pudgy and ineffectual; Sharon’s face was drawn and haggard and thin, but the lines were those of a model: like her daughter’s face, what Bubbles might look like in another quarter century. They looked ordinary.

“Motherfuckers!” Hoodoo Mama shrieked, and her zombies howled with her. Ink had both arms around Joey, clinging to her desperately. Joey pointed at the LaFleurs. “You miserable cocksuckers! You stay the fuck away from her, you hear me!”

Sharon LaFleur looked at them, hand over mouth. The zombies started to shamble toward them. The cops shuffled nervously, weapons up and ready. “Joey, you can’t!” Jerusha shouted.

Joey shook her head. “You kill her,” she screamed at the LaFleurs, “and I’ll just raise her up again. She’ll be the biggest fucking zombie in the whole goddamn world. You hear me, you cocksuckers?”

Ira LaFleur nodded to the officers nearest the grey box, which now had a panel open. The low whine of the pumps driving Bubbles’s feeding tubes suddenly vanished. The silence was more terrible than any sound could have been.